IC-Pac work plan

Phase 1: Preliminary

• Overview of existing and past regional climate projection efforts for Pacific Islands and other small islands worldwide.
• Co-develop guidelines for coordinated experiments including selection of targeted convection permitting sub-domains for some island groups. Criteria include: island types and distribution, availability of observations, local stakeholder interest, regional climate phenomena, partners’ interest.
• Meetings with local stakeholders to identify key climate hazards of interest.

Phase 2: Evaluation of current climate simulations

• Collection of a variety of observational data for evaluation
• Perform ERA5 driven Regional kilometre-scale Climate Model (RCM) simulations and evaluate with a variety of observations. Include assessment of stakeholder identified climate hazards.
• Identify model capacity to simulate island climate and the components required for adequate simulation. Further develop the RCMs to improve performance over islands. 
• Evaluate ML surrogates of ERA5-driven RCM simulations

Phase 3: Future climate change

• Identify GCMs that perform well in this region and whose climate change spans the range of future changes in key aspects of the climate including temperature and precipitation.
• Perform coordinated simulation experiments of the recent past and future
• Analyse the projected future climate outcomes in various ways including the climate hazards of interest to stakeholders.

Phase 4: Enabling  use of climate projections

Run workshops and write guidelines to assist stakeholders on the islands to effectively use these climate projections when assessing climate change impacts and performing climate change risk assessments.